Posted by speerer 5 hours ago
News organizations have been in decline for a few decades because of two reasons:
1. Lack of ad revenue (all vacuumed up by Google)
2. Loss of subscribers because they can get free news online
Don't expect quality from people not being paid much.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/rober...
Neutral journalism is not presenting the claims of all opposing parties, it's fact-checking the claims of both sides without a bias for any of them.
If one party says the truth and the other side is not, it's still neutral to repeat only the claims of the first one.
This is the key. Nobody wanted to read yesterday’s newspaper and the same applies to recent digital media world. Media are pushed to deliver almost instant news feed.
Common news stories are often updated several times an hour. This leads to burnout for the journalist covering the event.
This constant focus on breaking news is so common and devastating on society that it has inspired books like Newport’s The Deep Work.
Yes.
> it seems that the current trend in journalism is to be as factual as possible, without adding in one's own biases
No. It is not factual at all. Factual journalism would check facts and said 'Hormuze is not open' or even 'Trump lied again'. The 'neutral journalism' or 'both sides' or 'they say they say' is bias on itself - and harmful one at that.
I watched the speech live. He said he’d be running for a fourth term because he’s still claiming that he won in 2020. That’s a crazy lie so AP News helpfully changed it to “quipped about a third presidential term.”
That might seem minor on its own but I’ve noticed it’s been occcuring more and more like [2] where the headline calls out the Democrats for blocking a bill and simultaneously calls the bill bi partisans, or [3] which on review actually seems like more of your critique than the sanewashing where they report that a crack in a container vessel reduced pressure but then take the officials statements that nothing leaked out like physics got an update where you can have pressure reduced from material escaping the container but it magically is still all inside the container
[1] https://apnews.com/article/correspondents-dinner-trump-shoot...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/democrats-senate-fisa-trump-pulte...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/california-tank-leak-explosion-ga...
Under late stage capitalism, the main driver in any industry, not just journalism, is unscrupulous opportunism. Profit comes first, at the cost of everything else, including, of course, effort and sincere expression.
The 2020 tune sang, worldwide, comes to mind: "Anyone believing SaRS-COV2 may have originated in a lab is a conspiracy cracknut, like those who believe we didn't land on the moon".
This was everywhere and very few, including here on HN, did dare to question the official version.
Now the official report mandated by US Congress says the virus has non-zootropic properties and the "expert" who explained it couldn't possibly be a lab-leak is prevented from ever getting funding from the US. And it's not just US congress: the CIA changed its stance too and publicly said it's leaning towards a lab-leak after all. The examples are countless.
And yet the bile spilled and the attacks on those disputing the mainstream media version were incessant.
I posted links, back then, to an article by an actual investigative journalist who explained how Peter Daszak was doing gain-of-function research on bat-modified viruses only to be met with derision.
It's sickening, really.
People would do well to assume that, by default, mainstream media "journalists" aren't journalists but pawns relaying state propaganda.
The media is absolutely just state propaganda.
Not that the US government has any credibility left after current admin, but the statements in here are factual, they really did take down youtube videos that were speculating about lab leak. I saw it happen.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
We can live in a society where a massive scandal happens and it takes two months for the systems and mechanisms to respond to it. I genuinely believe that most stories are better delivered with full information and nuance well after the event occurs than immediately.
When life finally happened, I had to force myself to "slow" down. By "slow" I don't mean read less news, but rather I'd dedicate a week a month for catching up to the prior month's news (via RSS, etc).
And that's where I learned the same lesson as you: It's better to read about a news event a month or so after the actual event. The first few days is mostly speculation, and it's best not to get rumors in your head. Seeing all those articles at once makes it easy to glean what did and didn't happen. Seeing them piecemeal over a month made it harder.
(I don't bother with news any more, but that lesson stuck with me).
Consuming news has little to do with being informed. Quite the opposite, at times.
It is fairly maddening when you know what they say is completely inconsistent with what was happening.
Those are the things that actually make you informed about the world, in my opinion, not the news feed.
Ultimately, it didn't work for me, but that's my fault. Despite my best intentions, it turned out I wasn't interested in reading about world affairs beyond the news cycle.
I don't recall it really surfacing things that didn't make the news cycle, but one thing I failed to mention is they had (have?) really good infographics/visualizations! They have a lot of the more recent ones here https://www.slow-journalism.com/filter/infographics
i've often thought about making a site that lets you easily do side-by-side comparisons of news sites on different timescales (1 week, 1 month, 1 year) so you can pull it up and show them "see all this stuff that you feel like you NEED to consume? like it makes you a better informed member of society? how much of it actually mattered and how much of it was just there to hook you in the moment?"
They're a good fit on your "one week" timescale.
What would you need to start such a project?
People that get sucked into social media srolling for hours know that they're not doing something good for themselves, people are guzzling from the fear-monger newshose and they think they're doing something "healthy".
There was all kinds of quasi-serious news-adjacent crap like 60 minutes, 48 hours, etc. The big difference was none if it was data driven and backed by algorithms that are constantly tuned for max engagement.
The invented news and invented intensity is the problem.
I'm trying to tell people, you have to take initiative, you have to have agency and be responsible for your own attention.
If you are being "fed" from a "feed" you are being fattened for slaughter
My latest life hack which I can recommend to anyone, at least in Germany: as part of my local library membership I get access to the PressReader app, which gives me access to the print edition of the economist! At 10 EUR a year it’s so affordable it nearly feels like it’s unethically so for what I get. I guess I’ll close with: May we forever be blessed with libraries, and may they never be „optimised away“ as an unnecessary social good.
A newspaper called The Economist should not take a hyper-critical view of conservatism or right-leaning politics across the globe, and hyper-liberal views about decisions leaders are making. I do not need my morals being shaped by my news outlet - full stop.
I find the Week and the Financial Times to be significantly better.
[1] https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/glossary.html#term-recipe
I used to work at Tortoise (who now own/operate The Observer) and our motto was 'Slow News'. We operated on a pretty transparent membership model, but I got the impression that it was difficult to make pure membership work financially, leading to a reliance on other revenue streams like podcasting and business partnerships over time.
Delayed Gratification – The Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32222831 - July 2022 (16 comments)
Delayed Gratification: A Slow Journalism Magazine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200573 - Jan 2020 (23 comments)